The contribution of NLO and LPM corrections to thermal dilepton emission in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Recently lots of efforts have been made to obtain the next to leading order and Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal corrections to the thermal dilepton emission rate in perturbative QCD. Here we apply these results to the plasma created in heavy ion collisions and see wether these corrections improve the comparison between theoretical calculations and experimental results for the invariant mass dependence of the dilepton emission rate. In particular, we simulate the quark-gluon plasma produced at RHIC and LHC using a 2+1-dimensional viscous hydro model. We compare our results to STAR experiment and comment on the need for a non-perturbative determination of the dilepton rate at low invariant mass.